Journal of Financial Intermediation最新文献

We use bank-firm matched data to study how the capital buffers that large U.S. banks must satisfy to “pass” the Federal Reserve's stress tests impact banks’ lending and firms’ loan volumes, overall debt, investment, and employment. We find that larger stress-test capital buffers lead to reductions in banks’ lending, modest increases in loan rates and spreads, and reductions in new loan originations. However, we do not find an impact of higher capital buffers on firms’ overall debt, investment, and employment, suggesting that firms find other credit sources to substitute for the reduction in loans from banks that participate in the stress tests.

We study restructuring solutions to the debt overhang problem faced by banks with a deteriorated loan portfolio in the presence of asymmetric information on loan quality. Classical liability restructuring solutions fail to work because banks can overstate the severity of their bad loan problem to obtain additional concessions from existing creditors. A sufficiently large loan sale requirement to the restructuring banks discourages such an opportunistic behavior, so a suitably chosen menu of loan sales cum liability restructuring is able to solve the debt overhang. We discuss the implementation of such a solution for banks funded with insured deposits through loan sales to outside investors supported by an asset protection scheme sponsored by the deposit insurance fund.

We address whether politics played important roles in allocating Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) bailout funds, and whether PPP allocations effectively bailed out small businesses vs. banks. Our econometric evidence suggests that politicians/other government agents at national and local levels effectively steered PPP funds toward small businesses and banks based on their locations to try to influence election outcomes. We also uncover evidence that some PPP funds were effectively allocated by lobbying efforts of certain banks. Findings are confirmed by a novel mediation analysis and numerous robustness checks. We also find banks profited from PPP through multiple channels, adding to extant findings, and suggesting that PPP may have effectively bailed out banks as well as small businesses, but through different political influences.

The Jobs Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 cut the top dividend tax rate in the U.S. by more than half, yet numerous studies of nonfinancial firms have failed to detect the expected supply-side stimulus to capital investment. We test the impact of this tax cut on U.S. commercial banks and find that bank lending responded differently, conditional on banks’ access to external capital as well as their reliance on internal liquidity. Our heterogeneous results include support for all three branches of dividend tax theory. Loan growth increased the most at publicly traded banks with relatively illiquid balance sheets and increased by the least (or not at all) at untraded banks with relatively liquid balance sheets. Consistent with previous studies, we find increased dividend payouts at all subsets of banks. We conjecture that the effectively short maturities of bank loan contracts made banks better able to respond positively to this tax cut and provide some suggestive evidence in support of this conjecture.

Using unique administrative data on firm-to-firm payments and bank-to-firm lending, we investigate how lending to a firm is affected by same-bank lending to the firm's customers and suppliers. We show that the supply of loans to a firm increases when the firm's customers have loans from the same bank. We also find that negative information about a firm's top customer causes banks to tighten the loan supply to the firm, and particularly more so when the firm's sales are concentrated on this customer. These results suggest that lending to firms connected through the supply chain conveys valuable information to banks.

We document that reliance on internal ratings-based (IRB) models to compute credit risk and capital requirements reduces bank opacity. Greater reliance on IRB models is associated with lower absolute forecast error and reduced disagreement among analysts regarding expected bank earnings per share. These results are stronger for banks that apply internal ratings to the most opaque loans and adopt the advanced version of IRB models, which entail a more granular risk assessment and greater disclosure of risk parameters. The results stem from the higher earnings informativeness and the more comprehensive disclosure of credit risk in banks adopting internal ratings. We employ an instrumental variables approach to validate our findings.

Using hand-collected data on corporate bond and stock offerings, we identify the impact of government debt on corporate financing during World War I. The early twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to identify the impact of government debt on private financing because during this period (1) firms announced the amount they wanted to raise before each security offering and (2) the Treasury issued debt in discrete intervals. We identify the impact of Treasury issues by comparing differences in the amount firms offered to the amount they actually raised when the Treasury was borrowing to when the Treasury was not in the market. We find that long-term government bond offerings negatively affect both amount of long-term corporate bonds and dividend paying stocks issued. In contrast, we find no effect on short-term debt issue. Our findings suggest that investors view stable dividend paying stocks a close substitute for relatively safe long-term bonds.

In 1936–37, the Federal Reserve doubled member banks’ reserve requirements. Friedman and Schwartz (1963) famously argued that the doubling increased reserve demand and forced the money supply to contract, which they argued caused the recession of 1937–38. Using a new database on individual banks, we find that higher reserve requirements did not generally increase banks’ reserve demand or contract lending because reserve requirements were not binding for most banks. Aggregate effects on credit supply from reserve requirement increases were therefore economically small and statistically zero.

We study mortgagors’ attitudes toward strategic behavior following a foreclosure moratorium in Greece. To identify strategic delinquencies, we exploit the concurrent introduction of a debt discharge process that provides generous debt relief for borrowers who prove their inability to pay but entails high costs for those who can afford their mortgages. This setting creates distinct optimal strategies for delinquent borrowers: non-strategic mortgagors participate in the debt discharge process, whereas strategic borrowers use the moratorium to protect their homes. Our results indicate that borrower sophistication, aversion to moral hazard, banking relationships, and preference for liquidity play an important role in strategic behavior.